How Your Child Heals: An Inside Look at Common Childhood Ailments

225 Pages·2010·0.64 MB·English

by  Christopher M. Johnson

How Your Child Heals

How Your Child Heals
An Inside Look at Common
Childhood Ailments
Christopher M. Johnson, MD
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
Lanham (cid:129) Boulder (cid:129) New York (cid:129) Toronto (cid:129) Plymouth, UK
Published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
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http://www.rowmanlittlefield.com
Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2010 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Johnson, Christopher M.
How your child heals : an inside look at common childhood ailments /
Christopher M. Johnson.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-4422-0203-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-0205-4
(electronic)
1. Children—Health and hygiene—Popular works. 2. Healing—Popular works.
3. Pediatrics—Popular works. I. Title.
RJ61.J65 2010
618.92—dc22 2009050220
(cid:2)™
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 Inflammation: A Visit to a Sore Finger 3
2 Location, Location, Location: An Ear Infection’s Lesson 19
3 Sometimes the Body Does Silly Things: What Asthma
Looks Like 37
4 Not All Body Parts Are Useful: A Look Inside a
Sick Appendix 55
5 How We Know the Enemy: A Close-up View of the
Immune System 71
6 When the Environment Attacks: Allergies and
Other Encounters 91
7 Fevers, Aches, and Itches: Where Do Symptoms
Come From? 107
8 How Injuries Heal: An Inside Expedition to Bruises
and Broken Bones 125
9 What Cancer Can Teach Us about Healing 141
10 How Can We Help a Child Heal? 157
v
vvii CCoonntteennttss
11 When Healing Fails 173
12 Healing and the Tree of Life 189
Suggestions for Further Reading 199
Index 203
About the Author 209
Acknowledgments
I
thank my wife, Jennie, for her encouragement to write about the little
people I care for every day, and my able agent, Anne Devlin, for her faith
in my ability to write these books. I especially thank Dr. Kathy Rhodes,
whose enthusiasm and skill inspired me, thirty-five years ago, to spend
my career doing this.
vii

Introduction
I
have watched children heal from illness and injury for more than thirty
years. Throughout that time, I often found myself wondering just what,
exactly, healing meant. We grown-ups stand over a sick child and watch
the process, but really we are a far distance away from the actual drama,
which is inside the child. There, events we dimly understand and barely
control work themselves out. Ever since my first years in medicine, I have
tried to imagine what the excitement and pageantry of those microscopic
events must be like, because to understand them is to understand how
healing happens. Throughout my years in the research laboratory, when
I looked through the microscope I often conjured up scenes of the actors
in the tiny drama unfolding below. I wished somehow to be there—if not
as a participant, then at least as an observer. This book is my attempt to
put you there, to share with you how those fascinating, complex events
appear to me.
In the process, I skip lightly over a vast amount of medical research in
immunology, pathology, and general cell biology. Other experts in these
fields will likely find my brush too broad at times. But I think stepping
back from the minutiae to see the forest for the trees is enormously useful.
This book is a voyage of discovery into the astonishing microscopic world
our children, and we adults, too, carry around all the time. It is a world
full of wonderful, magical sights. I hope you enjoy reading about them as
much as I have enjoyed studying them through the years.
11